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For some of these examples, I suspect that the short term transitional solution will be to simply reshape our spaces to make them co-accessible to humans and robots. For example, a robot could much more easily stock shelves in a fully automated grocery if items came in more standard package sizes (think standard like shipping containers or paper sizes), where guaranteed to have readable barcodes, and were part of a fully automated loading dock to shelf system-of-systems with all standardized pieces. Could probably handle automated inventory management, expiration dates, recalls, etc as well. In fact, with enough standardization it would probably be conceivable to go directly from factory to store shelf without a human in the loop. With enough automation the stores could be made more JIT and take up less space. Keep more things in a warehouse section, have smaller shelves, and restock rapidly throughout the day. There are really two problems though: 1. we're working too hard to try to get these things to work in a human designed or adapted world. This kind of store would probably be pretty boring for humans to interact with (think less interesting than a Costco) 2. all this automation is way more expensive than a handful of low paid humans across 2 or 3 shifts. Anecdote: I remember when I was younger some highly automated test sites for fast food franchises. They'd completely automated the drink pouring, or cooking and assembly of some menu items. They all disappeared very quickly and were never repeated. The TCO, including downtime loss of business, was crushing to the businesses...think your average McDonald's soft serve machine but the entire business depends on it working perfectly all day, every day of the week. But if this is solved, or acceptable, a good test target product set would likely be cereal, soda, or canned goods. It makes up the bulk of the store interior. Could probably be extended to the bakery pretty quick. This would leave harder to handle products like meats, produce, and so on to human hands for a while, but those could probably eventually be overcome with enough millions in R&D or behavior changes in the public. |